About Sachan

I don't make art. I make objects that communicate visually.

I came to art through photography, so I never start from a blank page. A painting starts with a photo, or a bit of rubbish I've found in the road on my walk home. Something in it has to prick me first. Then I feel my way in.

After the crash I picked up Debbie's camera and took it to Cuba. I didn't edit anything then. It was just me, the camera and getting on with people. The place was so alive: a Santero church, long days at the university, a vibe I can still feel. But when I came home, the photographs showed sad faces, crumbling buildings and beautiful women who looked hollow. My friends saw dereliction where I had felt life. At the time I thought I was failing as a photographer, because I could see passion in other people's pictures. That feeling stayed with me for the next ten years, through better cameras and lenses, Photoshop and every trick of image manipulation I learnt. Eventually I hung up my camera as a way of expressing myself. I still picked it up now and then, but more and more I worked on my thousands of old images in Photoshop, Lightroom and Revel, chasing one perfect, award-winning picture, and slowly realising I was no longer doing photography. That gap between what I felt and what the camera saw is why I paint.

I know the feeling I'm after. What I don't know is how I'll get there. I call that the sacred space of not knowing, and I try to trust it. If I push a painting where I want it to go, I ruin it. We are all born seeing the world as a magical place, and it takes a decade of education to change that. Sometimes I wish I could just draw like a child.

Paula Rego said you should never do art. That's my sincerity test. Never do art. If I catch myself trying to impress, the painting goes in the bin. Sometimes it's such a relief to destroy a painting. It's just the best thing ever.

Frames matter. Almost all of mine come from junk shops or charity shops. Often I can't finish a painting till I've found its frame. Sometimes it fits, sometimes it clashes. Either way, the painting and the frame have to talk to each other.

Once I know which memory I'm chasing, I work the surface as much as the image. Slightly reflective, sometimes textured, it reacts to the light and to where you're standing, so the painting shifts as you look at it. I like art that glitches on the paper. No photo on this site can show that. If you can, come and stand in front of one.

I feel the left-hand side of everything I work on is closer in time to me than the right. So you can read my pieces left to right, not just as normal reading, but as going slightly backwards through time. It just happens naturally, I think because I read left to right. Oddly, on a page of text the unread words ahead are the future, but my paintings read into the past.

I volunteer at Age Concern's charity shop, testing donated electrical goods and pricing the donated art. Most of my frames come from there or from Acorn, and a few I've rescued from the rubbish pile. 10% of every sale goes back to charity, usually the shops that sold me the frame, or CRY Jersey (Care and Relief for the Young). A lot of my paint, glue, brushes and clips come from charity shops too, alongside new materials when I need them.

I paint everything to keep. Letting a painting go isn't easy for me, but I know I can't keep them all. And funnily enough, I don't hang much of my own work around the house. My studio's at home and it's already full of my pictures, so outside it I like to live with other people's work.

I enjoy the mistake. Herbie Hancock once played a really wrong note, and Miles Davis played the next one so it came out right. That's how I work. Even a big mistake can be put right.

The truth is rarely painless, so I try to be as raw and blunt as I can. It's a self-indulgent thing I do. I'm not doing anyone any favours. I'm just sharing it.

I don't paint to be liked. I want it to be experienced, not liked.

Sachan (David Gardiner), Jersey